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The best reason to go to college is to live a more successful, more satisfying life than you otherwise would have lived.

Colleges at their best are in the transformation business. You go to college with one level of ability and one set of goals. By the time you graduate you are not only capable of taking on much bigger challenges, but your understanding of which challenges are worth you time and effort has expanded as well. If you aren't convinced that going to college will lead to a more satisfying life, one in which you are able to dream bigger dreams and figure out how to turn those dreams into reality, then don't waste your time and money going to college.

Having been a college student, taught at college and worked to help run a college, I have observed the impact of college on the lives of many students. Unfortunately, not every college graduate has been transformed into a more powerful individual who knows how to make life work and how to make a difference with her or his life. And while the vast majority of college graduates have grown in college and truly are transformed in some way by their college experiences, most of them could have grown more if they had done so purposefully.

So what I suggest to you is that if you decide to go to college, then go to college ON PURPOSE. Have a purpose for going to college, and then work at making sure you achieve that purpose while you are there.

And the purpose for going to college that is likely to give you the most value from college is to be committed to transforming yourself into a bigger, more powerful, more aware and more passionate individual who is going to leave college excited to go out and make a difference in the world and is well prepared to do so.

If you go to college with transforming yourself into the person you hope to be as your purpose, I promise that college will transform you for the better in ways you can't even imagine right now. Then the rest of your life will be better for having made this investment in yourself.

So if you don't feel right now that you have a purpose for going to college, or if that purpose doesn't involve a commitment to growing beyond who you are right now, I would strongly encourage you to spend some time thinking about who you want to be and what difference you want to make in the world. Then you can decide whether college can be a big step toward living that life.

A simple exercise which has helped many people find an inspiring purpose for living their lives involves making two lists. Take our two pieces of paper.  On one write down the most recent 10-20 times you can remember when you were really enjoying yourself. Then look at your list and ask yourself questions about what you were actually doing in each of these activities, where you were doing it and who was with you when you did it. Look for common traits. For example, you may find that most of the items on your list involve physical activity. Maybe most of them involve learning. You list may be full of solitary activities or activities which involve teamwork. Take some notes on what patterns you observe.

On the second piece of paper write an ending to the statement, If I had the power to make the world a better place, I would... Repeat this five to ten times, adding a different ending every time.

Now, spend some time asking yourself how someone doing what you have discovered you love to do could contribute to making the world a better place in one of the ways that matters to you. What you come up with is a potential calling. It is a way that you can contribute your personal strengths and passions to a cause that matters to you. This is a purpose that you can act on which will help you become the person you most want to become.

If you decide that college will help you become the person you want to be, doing what you most want to do you will find a way to get into a good college that supports your goals, and you will do what it takes to make college work for you. Taking the time now to understand what college has to offer you and what level of effort you are willing to bring to your college career is much more cost effective than going through college with minimum effort and without a clear purpose.

At this point you might be thinking that I'm now talking impractical nonsense, or that what I am saying may work for other people but it doesn't make sense for you. I'm willing to accept that not everything I recommend will turn out to be valuable to everyone who reads it. However, I am committed to having you making the best possible decisions about college so that you get as much out of college as you can and so that whatever you decide will help you go on to live a better life as a result. And because I am committed to you having that result I want to address the all too common human tendency toward cynicism and resignation with which many readers are probably reading this section.

If you think I'm not being practical when I suggest you look for a truly inspiring reason to go to college please consider this very practical question: Who gets to decide what your life is for? Who gets to decide how to use your life? I hope the answer is pretty obvious to you. While lots of people, including me, can offer you opinions about what your life is for, it is your life. You get to decide what it is for.

But most people don't want to be responsible for deciding what their life is for, so they do what they are suppose to do, whether that inspires them or not. Most people end up settling for a life that may be comfortable or enjoyable, but isn't inspiring. If you are willing to take responsibility for deciding what your life is for, you create an opportunity to live a life that excites and inspires you.

At the end of your life would you rather look back and say that you did what you were suppose to do, or do you want to be able to say you did what you were inspired to do? Well life doesn't get lived backwards, so if you want to be able to say you lived the inspired life, then at some point you need to be willing to identify what inspires you and to take action based on that inspiration

A very common reason why people won't let themselves be inspired is that they know that their dreams won't come true. They are sure that they are fated to live lives of compromise and making due. They think inspiring lives only happen to the lucky or the gifted. Such people operate on the motto, 'Tis better to have loved but kept it to myself than to have risked the embarrassment of having anyone know I loved and lost. In the worst case scenario, those who aren't willing to risk following their dreams may not even admit to themselves that they have dreams because they don't want to feel bad for not making those dreams come true. The predictable result of following such a don't-dream-too-big strategy is that they will settle for a life that is not very satisfying.

Whether you are willing to be inspired and then act on your inspirations will have much more impact on the life you live than whether or not you go to college. So the best reason to go to college is because you are inspired to do something with your life, and you see that college is going to help you make it happen.

But you don't have to have everything figured out before you go to college. For many people college is where they find something that inspires them. In fact, if you graduate from college with exactly the same plans you had when you entered college you probably haven't learned as much as you could have.

One trick to living an inspired life is that you need to be willing to take actions based on what inspires you, but you also need to be willing to trade up. As you pursue your current inspirations be willing to discover something that inspires you even more. One of the predictable results of living an inspired life is that what you do will be unpredictable.

So I hope you find a way to live your life on purpose. Then continue to learn and let your purpose in life unfold and grow. And if you decide that college is a valuable step in living that life, I hope that you graduate having discovered more of your strengths and having a clearer sense of where you most want to make a difference in the world. If that is your experience, you will have been a big winner in the college game.